"Nothing of any consequence," says Stella, reading on and suddenly changing colour.
"Ah!" The Baroness marks the Revue with her pencil. When she looks up again, Stella has left the room. Without wasting another thought upon her, the student goes on with her reading.
Stella, meanwhile, is lying on the bed in her little room, into which the moon shines marking the floor with the outlines of the window-panes. Her face is buried among the pillows, and she is crying as if her heart would break.
'Nothing of any consequence'! True enough, of no consequence for the Baroness, that second sheet of Stasy's, but for Stella of great, of immense consequence.
"Guess whom I encountered lately at Steinbach?" writes the Gurlichingen. "Edgar Rohritz. Of course we talked of our dear Erlach Court, and consequently of you. He spoke very kindly of you, only regretting that in consequence of your odd education, or of a certain exaggeration of temperament, you lacked reserve, tenue, a defect which might be unfortunate for you in life. Of course I defended you. They say everywhere that he is betrothed to Emmy Strahlenheim.
"Have you heard the news,--the very latest? Rohritz is a sly fellow indeed. All that loss of property of which we heard so much was only a fraud. The report originated in some trifling depreciation of certain bank-stock. He did not contradict the report, allowing himself to be thought impoverished that he might escape the persecutions of the mothers and daughters of Grätz. Max Steinbach let out the secret a while ago. Is it not the best joke in the world? I am glad no one can accuse me of ever making the slightest advances to him."
CHAPTER XVII.
[WINTER.]
The death-struggle of the year is over,--past are the treacherous gleams of sunlight among falling leaves and smiling flowers,--past, past! Cold and grave like a hired executioner, mute and secret like a midnight assassin, the first hard frost has fallen upon the earth in the previous night and completed its great work of destruction.
It is All Souls'; the Meinecks leave for Paris in the evening, and in the morning Stella goes to mass in the little church on the mountain-side at the foot of which is the churchyard,--the churchyard in which the colonel lies buried. The flames of the thick wax candles on the altar, the flames of the candles thick and thin lighted everywhere in memory of the dead, flicker dull and red in the gray daylight.